Wednesday, 23 November 2011

The pain of Windows XP installations! MBR/GPT

I have spent about 10 hours of time trying to install Windows XP as a dual boot on my Linux laptop and all the problems I had and the fact I lost my Linux partitions are all related to Microsoft's selfish installer that overwrites the master boot record rather than installing alongside whatever is already there but it is worse than that.
I have two Windows XP CDs a full 64 bit one and an upgrade 32 bit one and the reason I am installing it, although I am more than happy with Ubuntu is because, as you might expect, there is a piece of software I want to use that only runs on Windows and Mac.
Simple, I thought, I've done it before. You partition your disk from the Linux boot CD using GParted and then run the windows installer which overwrites the MBR. You then re-run the grub install from the bLinux boot CD and you're back in business. Except I wasn't.
The problem I had related to something I didn't know existed. Guid Partition Table (GPT) which is a more modern and better use of the master boot record that doesn't require a limit on primary partitions and the funny use of extended and logical partitions - fair enough. What I didn't realise was that Windows XP 64 bit (and presumably other new Windows) installs this without telling you that it is totally incompatible with older systems like Windows XP 32. This wouldn't have even been noticed since grub can handle GPT except for one problem. I installed Windows XP 64 bit and most of the drivers for my hardware weren't there (or even on the net, they were probably never written). So I had got a working dual boot system with XP 64 but which was mostly useless.
No problem, I thought, I'll just run the XP 32 bit installation and choose the XP 64 bit partition as the destination and it can overwrite everything. Right? Nope. Run up the XP installation CD and all it can see is 131Gb of an unknown partition type (it's 160Gb disk but more on that later). I was confused. What was happening? Ah. Maybe I need to re-run grub to reset the MBR before the installation will read it correctly. Nope. Still the same. I couldn't work out what was happening, even from Google so the helpful people at ubuntuforums suggested the problem was related to my new GPT boot record which XP 32 didn't understand. They were right so now I was a bit stuffed, how can I overwrite the GPT with MBR so that XP 32 will understand?
This is where I cocked up a bit. I ran up GParted again and found out there was an option to re-write the boot record (with the MBR format) which I chose. It warned about data loss but I presumed it meant there was a risk. What actually happens is that it wipes all the current partition information and then writes the MBR. I tried disktool to get them back but somewhere, they must have experienced a quick format and lost the data. I wasn't too bothered. I have a backup of most of my stuff and use Google quite heavily, at least.
So I then spent the next hours trying various combinations of GParted and diskpart (the windows equivalent) as well as fdisk to try and get XP 32 to read the 160Gb disk. It was like nothing made any difference. Was I actually resetting the MBR at all?
This was when I learned something else. Various combinations of HDD, 32 bit OS and BIOS settings means that the installation would only be able to 'see' the first 131Gb of the disk. What I ended up doing was what is suggested for a clean dual boot install. Do Windows XP first. I removed all partitions, created a 50Gb partition for Windows to use and then ran the installation. Did the pain end there? Nope, see my next post.

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About Me

I work for PixelPin being in charge of all development for our company, which includes mostly .Net web applications but also PHP, Android and iOS programming as well as managing our hardware and cloud-based systems.

I live in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire in the UK which is lovely in the summer and miserable in the winter.